Geography Commons^™

Crime And Social Strain In Fairfax County, Va: Using Geographical Information Science To Test For Social Strain In The Aftermath Of The Great Recession, Jason D. Reyes

Geography and the Environment: Graduate Student Capstones

Robert Merton, through the Social Strain Theory, suggests that crime exists because of society’s demands do not meet individuals needs. The following study is a qualitative study that first explains what the Social Strain Theory is, then tests to see if this theory has any validity to one of the most affluent counties in the United States. This study compares Fairfax County’s socioeconomic variables with the their crime data during the Great Recession to uncover any trends or patterns for which Robert Merton would say are due to high amounts of Social Strain. The overall results of the study suggest …

Development And Mapping Techniques For The Comprehensive Community Wildfire Protection Plan (Cwpp) For Jefferson County, Colorado, Scot Fitzgerald

Geography and the Environment: Graduate Student Capstones

The Community Wildfire Protection Plan (CWPP) development process highlighted in this document was developed for multiple CWPP for Jefferson County, Colorado. Documents were created for three Fire Protection Districts, and a larger scale plan was developed to cover all of Jefferson County. The county-wide plan was developed combining existing fire protection district CWPP information, infrastructure data from the Jefferson County GIS department, and fuels and vegetation from LANDFIRE in order to create maps with which wildfire hazards and fuel mitigation recommendations could be identified. The final CWPP is a tool for communities and other local stakeholders to implement wildfire hazard …

A Comparison Of The Transition Of Denver Neighborhood Crime From 2000 To 2010, David Muenkel

Geography and the Environment: Graduate Student Capstones

The purpose of this project was to study crime in the City of Denver, Colorado and show how crime moves between neighborhoods over time. The study involved looking at crimes aggregated at the neighborhood level to determine how crime transitioned within the City of Denver from 2000 to 2010. The crime data was also compared with calls for service to determine how police activity and citizen reporting related to crime in the City of Denver. The results indicated that the City of Denver, while increasing in population from 554,636 in 2000 to 600,156 in 2010 had a reduction in the …

From Lakes To Plants: Spatial Assessment Of Vegetation Dynamics Along 52 Disappearing Lakes In The Boreal Forests Of Alaska From 1984-2009 In The Yukon Flats Wildlife Refuge, Steve Ewest

Geography and the Environment: Graduate Student Capstones

A spatial assessment of vegetation change along the areas of shrinking lakes was conducted in 2011. The analysis utilized Landsat TM/ETM imagery bands 3 and 4 to calculate NDVI (normalized difference vegetation index) from 1984 to 2009 and applied cell and zonal statistics to measure the change as well as create an animation of the change. Also, three 30 meter bands and the zonal averages for the maximum values were assessed. The band in the 60-90 buffer bands has the greatest ratio amount of the maximum vegetation values when compared to the 0-30 meter and the 30-60 meter buffered bands. …

Digital Mapping As A Student And Staff Communication Tool, Ryan Gyurkovitz

Horticulture and Crop Science

A study in the use of Geographic Information Systems in the development of digital maps for use by students and staff in Plant Identification Courses.

Application Of Geographical Information System (Gis) For Mapping Road Traffic Injuries Using Existing Source Of Data In Karachi, Pakistan--A Pilot Study, Junsid Razzak, Uzma R. Khan, Sabeena Jalal

Department of Emergency Medicine

OBJECTIVE: To assess the feasibility of using Geographical Information System for mapping of road traffic injuries with an existing data source in a developing country.

METHODS: The study was a retrospectives case series of road traffic injury cases registered with the medico-legal office located in the three major trauma centers in Karachi for the period of January 1, 2004 till December 31st, 2004. Spatial data analysis was performed using ARCVIEW 3.1.

RESULTS: Out of 3650 of all road traffic injury, only 3% had locations detailed and accurate enough allowing mapping on a GIS map in the first attempt. Even after …

Automatic High-Fidelity 3d Road Network Modeling, Jie Wang

Computational Modeling & Simulation Engineering Theses & Dissertations

Many computer applications such as racing games and driving simulations frequently make use of 3D high-fidelity road network models for a variety of purposes. However, there are very few existing methods for automatic generation of 3D realistic road networks, especially for those in the real world. On the other hand, vast road network GIS data have been collected in the past and used by a wide range of applications, such as navigation and evaluation. A method that can automatically produce 3D high-fidelity road network models from 2D real road GIS data will significantly reduce both the labor and time needed …

The Microsoft Geospatial Library, Michael Kallay

2011 Symposium on Data-Driven Approaches to Droughts

In SQL Server 2008, Microsoft introduced support for geospatial data, with a rich set of spatial queries and constructions, in both Cartesian and geodetic coordinates. Most of this functionality is also available as an independent (free download) .NET library. This talk will focus on this library, touching on the differences in functionality between its TSQL and C# interfaces.

A Geographical Perspective Of The Statistical Data Of And About Greeley, Colorado, And Its Off-Premise Liquor Stores: Location, Number, And Possible Saturation, Scott Jones

Geography and the Environment: Graduate Student Capstones

This document, with the use of Geographical Information Systems, will verify that statistically Greeley, Colorado does not contain more than an adequate number of liquor stores within its city limits. This document is intended to give the reader a nonbiased geographical perspective of the statistical data of Greeley, Colorado and its off-premise liquor stores: location, number, and if it should be considered over-saturated.

The definition and allotments of a liquor store licenses vary. The three licenses available are Special Event, On Premise, and Off-Premise. These can commingle. This study was concerned with the license used for sale of full-strength products …

Farm Fragmentation: Mapping The Status And Trends Of Agricultural Lands In Colorado, Gabrielle Friedman

Geography and the Environment: Graduate Student Capstones

Statistical spatial analysis was used in this research to assess the factors contributing to the downsizing of farms as well as overall farm size choice in Colorado. The areas of research focus will be the spatial effects and the economic landscape. This work will challenge the common belief that large, corporate farms are swallowing up small farms in a consolidation effort. Further, the analysis will quantify and visualize the status of agricultural lands in Colorado. The research will help to inform the theoretical understanding of agricultural decision processes within the context of economic and spatial factors.

High School Graduation And Dropout Rates In The Pikes Peak Region Of Colorado: A Spatial Analysis Of School Proximity To Military Installations, Rachel Orlicky

Geography and the Environment: Graduate Student Capstones

The purpose of this project was to examine graduation and dropout rates for high school students to determine if a correlation could be found with respect to the relative school distance from a military installation in the Pikes Peak region. Spatial analysis and Ordinary Least Squares analysis were used to build a linear regression model to predict student graduation and dropout rates. The results for the total student population for graduation rates and for dropout rates showed no statistically significant correlation with respect to the relative proximity to a military installation. Detailed analysis revealed that several minority and gender subgroups …

Geographic Information Systems Correlation Modeling As A Management Tool In The Study Effects Of Environmental Variables’ Effects On Cultural Resources, Brian Wallace

Anthropology Graduate Projects and Theses

Utilizing Geographic Information Systems (GIS) offers the field of Cultural Resource Management greater capacity in managing resources. New regression analysis tools recently released in ESRI ArcGIS software offer potential for determining more accurate statistical analyses of the relationships between cultural material and environmental variables. The contemporary trend of federal cultural resource managers and GIS analysts working with smaller budgets is to allocate fiscal resources for tools which will enable them to continue successfully managing their resource. ArcGIS software continues to be the industry standard in managing spatial data to accurately represent the existence, condition, and location of cultural material. With …

Mapsnap System To Perform Vector-To-Raster Fusion, Boris Kovalerchuk, Peter Doucette, Gamal Seedahmed, Jerry Tagestad, Sergei Kovalerchuk, Brian Graff

All Faculty Scholarship for the College of the Sciences

As the availability of geospatial data increases, there is a growing need to match these datasets together. However, since these datasets often vary in their origins and spatial accuracy, they frequently do not correspond well to each other, which create multiple problems. To accurately align with imagery, analysts currently either: 1) manually move the vectors, 2) perform a labor-intensive spatial registration of vectors to imagery, 3) move imagery to vectors, or 4) redigitize the vectors from scratch and transfer the attributes. All of these are time consuming and labor-intensive operations. Automated matching and fusing vector datasets has been a subject …

Putting Artists On The Map: A Five Part Study Of Greater Cleveland Artists' Location Decisions - Part 5: Properties Analysis - Artist Housing Characteristics, Mark Salling, Gregory Soltis, Charles Post, Sharon Bliss, Ellen Cyran

All Maxine Goodman Levin School of Urban Affairs Publications

A series of reports detailing the residential and work space location preferences of Cuyahoga county's artists.

Gis And Web Technologies For Assessing Sediment Pollution From Abandoned Developments, Joshua Werts

All Theses

The economic crisis that occurred at the time of this research left numerous residential developments in the Southeastern United States in various stages of construction, creating a potential source of sediment runoff to waterways. Sediment runoff is potentially damaging to aquatic ecosystems and lakes. The objectives of this research include identifying these developments in upstate South Carolina through GIS/remote sensing analysis and implementation of an integrated webGIS framework. Residential development locations with significant bare soil areas were identified through GIS analysis involving Landsat 5 TM classification and aerial photograph verification. The Revised Universal Soil Loss Equation (RUSLE) was used in …

Assessing Seasonal Features Of Tropical Forests Using Remote Sensing, Roberto Bonifaz-Alfonzo

Department of Geography: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Tropical forests are key components of the biogeochemical cycles, complex in structure, diversity and dynamics, also, tropical regions have been deforested and modified by human activities particularly for agriculture. Understanding the inter-annual and intra-annual variation dynamics of tropical regions could give valuable information on temporal characteristics of ecosystems behavior which is important for mapping and monitoring. This dissertation assesses seasonal and inter-annual changes in the tropical land cover that may be related to changes in the natural environment and/or human activities. Research was focused on the Mayan forest located in southern Mexico and Northwest Guatemala, one of the northern-most important …

Putting Artists On The Map: A Five Part Study Of Greater Cleveland Artists' Location Decisions - Part 4: Predictive Analysis - Regression Modeling, Mark Salling, Gregory Soltis, Charles Post, Sharon Bliss, Ellen Cyran

All Maxine Goodman Levin School of Urban Affairs Publications

A series of reports detailing the residential and work space location preferences of Cuyahoga county's artists.

Putting Artists On The Map: A Five Part Study Of Greater Cleveland Artists' Location Decisions - Part 3: Attitudinal Analysis - Artist Housing And Space Survey, Mark Salling, Gregory Soltis, Charles Post, Sharon Bliss, Ellen Cyran

All Maxine Goodman Levin School of Urban Affairs Publications

A series of reports detailing the residential and work space location preferences of Cuyahoga county's artists.

Gestión Invisible: Manejo De Recursos Naturales En Dos Comunidades Indígenas Peruanas, Aleah Goldin, Yazmin Nunez, David S. Salisbury, James Águila Soria, Raquel Espinosa Linares, Enzo Pinedo Ramírez, Luís Rosero Flores, Miguel Nuñez Sánchez, Gerardo Cavero Oroche, Jorge Vela Alvarado, Oscar Barreto Vásquez, Giraldo Almeida Villanueva, Carlos Pérez Alván

Geography and the Environment Poster Presentations

El 5 de junio de 2009, unas treinta personas murieron en Bagua, Perú en un enfrentamiento entre las autoridades gubernamentales y los pueblos indígenas. El evento denominado el "Baguazo", destaca el papel marginalizado de los indígenas amazónicos cuando se enfrentan a los intereses comerciales multinacionales respaldados por el Estado (Shepard, 2009). Los pueblos indígenas estaban protestando la "Ley de la Selva", el Decreto 1090, un decreto de 2009 asumiendo las tierras indígenas boscosas como improductivas, y que proporciona la base legal para privatizar los bosques comunales para facilitar la extracción de petróleo, los proyectos de biocombustibles, los proyectos hidroeléctricos y …

Invisible Occupation: Indigenous Natural Resource Management In The Peruvian Amazon, Aleah Goldin, David S. Salisbury, James Águila Soria, Raquel Espinosa Linares, Enzo Pinedo Ramírez, Luís Rosero Flores, Miguel Núnez Sánchez, Gerardo Cavero Oroche, Jorge Vela Alvarado, Oscar Barreto Vásquez, Giraldo Almeida Villanueva, Carlos Pérez Alván

Geography and the Environment Poster Presentations

On June 5th 2009, an estimated thirty people died in a clash between governmental authorities and indigenous people near Bagua, Peru. Termed the "Bagua Massacre," this event underscores the marginalized role of Indigenous Amazonians when confronting multinational commercial interests supported by the state (Shepard, 2009). The indigenous people were protesting the “Law of the Jungle,” Decree 1090, a 2009 decree assuming heavily-forested indigenous lands idle and unproductive, and providing the legal basis to privatize comunally-held forests to facilitate petroleum, biofuel, hydroelectric and logging projects. Since contact, the assumption of indigenous people unproductively managing their forested homelands has fueled colonization, deforestation, …

Using A Geographic Information System To Define Regions Of Grape-Cultivar Suitability In Nebraska, Ting Chen

Department of Geography: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

The thesis was undertaken to develop a methodology and digital tool, based upon the use of Geographic Information System (GIS) technology, for delineating specific regions within the state of Nebraska that are suitable for the cultivation of two selected grape hybrids. The successful cultivation of grapes for producing wine requires knowledge of the physical and environmental conditions characterizing the local landscape. GIS technology allows the integration of multiple layers to be analyzed simultaneously, which
can provide prospective grape growers with necessary information upon which to base their management decision. In the study, nine GIS variables/layers including growing degree days, length …

Ir-Tree: An Efficient Index For Geographic Document Search, Zhisheng Li, Ken C. K. Lee, Baihua Zheng, Wang-Chien Lee, Dik Lun Lee, Xufa Wang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Given a geographic query that is composed of query keywords and a location, a geographic search engine retrieves documents that are the most textually and spatially relevant to the query keywords and the location, respectively, and ranks the retrieved documents according to their joint textual and spatial relevances to the query. The lack of an efficient index that can simultaneously handle both the textual and spatial aspects of the documents makes existing geographic search engines inefficient in answering geographic queries. In this paper, we propose an efficient index, called IR-tree, that together with a top-k document search algorithm facilitates four …

The American Community Survey And The 2010 Census, Robert Lycan, Charles Rynerson

Publications, Reports and Presentations

A presentation focusing on the 2010 Census redistricting data, the American Community Survey (ACS), analysis and use of census data. Describes the differences between the ACS and the census, and explains where and how this information may be accessed. The presentation also discusses imputation errors present in the census.

Theorizing Scale In Critical Place-Name Studies, Joshua Hagen

Geography Faculty Research

Building on broader developments in critical social theory, geographers have made significant strides in explicating the assumptions, motivations, and values involved in place naming. This has led to an emphasis on understanding the processes involved in the inscription, subversion, and revision of place names. Despite the increasingly sophisticated approaches found in place-name studies, the field of toponymy occupies a relatively minor position in academic geography. There are varied and complex reasons for this marginality, but perhaps the most salient critique is that place-name research has been slow to engage broader developments in geographic and social theory.

A Parallel Computing Approach To Fast Geostatistical Areal Interpolation, Qingfeng Guan, Phaedon Kyriakidis, Michael Goodchild

Geography Program: Faculty Publications

Areal interpolation is the procedure of using known attribute values at a set of (source) areal units to predict unknown attribute values at another set of (target) units. Geostatistical areal interpolation employs spatial prediction algorithms, i.e., variants of Kriging, which explicitly incorporate spatial autocorrelation and scale differences between source and target units in the interpolation endeavor. When all the available source measurements are used for interpolation, i.e., when a global search neighborhood is adopted, geostatistical areal interpolation is extremely computationally intensive. Interpolation in this case requires huge memory space and massive computing power, even with the dramatic improvement introduced by …

Social Disorganization And Sex Offenders In Minneapolis, Mn: A Socio-Spatial Analysis, Joseph Koncur

All Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Other Capstone Projects

Using a combination of techniques stemming from the spatial analysis approach of Geography, structural-functionalist theory in Sociology, and an ecological perspective of Criminology, this thesis addresses where sex offenders reside and why. Analyses were performed using the twin cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul, Minnesota as a typical urban setting. The study fuses multiple disciplines work on the complex social problem of released risk level III sex offender management in a spatially-conscious, micro-scale analysis attempting to understand the distribution of released offenders and the relevance of social disorganization theory in explaining their distribution. Socio-economic status and family disruption are tested …

Minnesota River Basin Flood Mapping And Impact Assessment, Willy J. Mekeel

All Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Other Capstone Projects

South Central Minnesota has experienced frequent flooding in the past because of the relatively flat topography, low elevation, and large amounts of snow melt in the spring. When these events happen, there is a large economic impact and potential health hazards to residents of the area. Having up-to-date flood zone maps can help residents be better prepared for emergency situations. Using Geographic Information Science (GIS), flood zone maps can be updated frequently in a more time efficient and inexpensive manner. Using a 30-meter digital elevation model (DEM) Compound Topographic Index (CTI) and Stream Power Index (SPI) layers were calculated for …

Gis Will Affect The Political Landscape For The Next Decade And Beyond, Mark Salling

All Maxine Goodman Levin School of Urban Affairs Publications

No abstract provided.

Determining Exurbia: Is It Really Its Own Entity Or Merely An Extension Of Americas Growing Suburbia, Thomas A. Green

All Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Other Capstone Projects

The purpose for studying exurbanization is to evaluate the spatial spread of metropolitan areas into their immediate hinterlands through remote sensing satellite imagery. This includes addressing scholar's inability to define exurbia, along with plausible reasons people move into exurbia. In addition, determination will include consideration on the possibility that exurbia has become an extension of America's growing and increasingly independent suburbia or; recognize that exurbia exists, but within various geographic locations. In return to the former, an analytical approach was taken to investigate scholar's inability to provide a definition to this phenomena; as well as inconsistent results on the push …

Gis Maps And The Amazon Borderlands, David S. Salisbury

Geography and the Environment Faculty Publications

With training, GIS can be used by all sectors of Latin American society and is the mapping tool of choice for institutions ranging from the Inter-American Development Bank to remote communities in the Amazon rain forest. Geographic information systems are thus a tool of the powerful and the marginalized and the official and the unofficial. [...] In this chapter, we see how GIS maps can improve our ability to analyze conflict over resources and allow additional participation in the process of mapping, but we also confront some of the many political and technical challenges that must be overcome to construct …